At 4:31 PM -0400 6/1/00, pdf@bizfon.com wrote:
>IE and Netscape both have their own way of getting rid of margins.
>In the BODY
>tag you would place marginheight=0 and marginwidth=0 for Netscape, and
>topmargin=0 and leftmargin=0 for IE. Is there a way to accomplish
>this for both
>IE and Netscape using style sheets?
If by "Netscape" you mean the 4.x generation, which has not seen any
progress whatsoever in support for W3C-standard UI languages since
1997, then No, Not Really.
It is not necessary to use the MS-proprietary topmargin/leftmargin
attributes either; CSS's body { padding: 0; margin: 0 } will suffice
in MSIE4+.
>Any suggestions?
In the real world, for presentation-sensitive client work, we
validate against a variant of 4.01 Transitional that permits the
Netscape-specific attributes (among other things; see comments):
<http://style.metrius.com/accounts/metrius_house/metrius_transitional.dtd>
>Or am I better off just keeping the non compliant method until
>Netscape supports this?
That's a value judgment.
My opinion (and then some): users of Netscape 4 no longer have any
right to expect the Web to look good to them. They do have a right to
expect that it will be minimally accessible as long as they turn
stylesheets off. If they won't/can't use a released browser with
superior support for CSS-1 (like MacIE5 or Opera, or even WinIE5 to a
lesser extent), they should be using Mozilla builds and reporting
bugs (as do I) so that soon enough they'll have a real choice.
What's more, I think that AOLTimeWarnerScape should immediately cease
distribution of products based on the current shipping codebase, and
encourage current holdouts either to turn off stylesheets or switch
to products with superior support, perhaps only until Mozilla
derivatives are viable (read: sporting less horrific UI). This is in
Netscape's longer term interests, since Netscape 6 (with its superior
support for CSS and other Web standards) will have little chance to
"strut its stuff" if Web developers at large must still worry about
how badly a significant installed base of Netscape 4.x will fare with
standards-based Web content.
Apologies for straying off topic. But here's some more: I'm fed up
with CSS (and (x)HTML and WAI, which are not attractive without CSS)
being hobbled by Netscape 4.x. It's not like the company's making
money on it directly. It's all about maximizing hits to Netcenter.
But by continuing to peddle the 4.x line, Netscape is squandering its
only hope of keeping the Web's content from disappearing into the
inscrutable folds of Microsoft's "customer-driven innovations" - the
only alternative as long as open standards like CSS are held hostage
to the Netscape 4.x scarecrow.
--
Todd Fahrner <mailto:fahrner@pobox.com>
"Such machines will have enormous appetites. One of them will take
instructions and data from a roomful of girls armed with simple
keyboard punches, and will deliver sheets of computed results every
few minutes. There will always be plenty of things to compute in the
detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things."
--Vannevar Bush, 1945.